Reading 2.2 Steve Neale, Questions of genre Expectations and verisimilitude There are several general, conceptual points to make at the outset. The first is that genres are not simply bodies of work or groups of films, however classified, labelled and defined. Genres do not consist only of films: they consist also, and equally, of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema, and which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process. These systems provide spectators with means of recognition and understanding. They help render films, and the elements within them, intelligible and therefore explicable. They offer
Chapter 2 The celebrity in the text 75 a way of working out the significance of what is happening on the screen: a way of working out why particular events and actions are taking place, why the characters are dressed the way they are, why they look, speak and behave the way they do, and so on. Thus, if, for instance, a character in a film for no reason (or no otherwise explicable reason) bursts into song, the spectator is likely to hypothesise that the film is a musical, a particular kind of film in which otherwise unmotivated singing is likely to occur. These systems also offer grounds for further anticipation. If a film is a musical, more singing is likely to occur, and the plot is likely to follow some directions rather than others. Inasmuch as this is the case, these systems of expectation and hypothesis involve a knowledge of indeed they partly embody various regimes of verisimilitude, various systems of plausibility, motivation, justification and belief. Verisimilitude means probable or likely. 1 It entails notions of propriety, of what is appropriate and therefore probable (or probable and therefore appropriate). Regimes of verisimilitude vary from genre to genre. (Bursting into song is appropriate, therefore probable therefore intelligible, therefore believable in a musical. Less so in a thriller or a war film.) As such these regimes entail rules, norms and laws. (Singing in a musical is not just a probability, it is a necessity. It is not just likely to occur, it is bound to.) As Tzvetan Todorov, in particular, has insisted, there are two types of verisimilitude applicable to representations: generic verisimilitude on the one hand, and, on the other, a broader social or cultural verisimilitude. Neither equates in any direct sense to reality or truth. [...] it is often the generically verisimilitudinous ingredients of a film, the ingredients, that is, which are often least compatible with regimes of cultural verisimilitude singing and dancing in the musical, the appearance of the monster in the horror film that constitute its pleasure, and that thus attract audiences to the film in the first place. They too, therefore, tend to be public, known, at least to some extent, in advance. [...] Genre and institutional discourse As John Ellis has pointed out, central to the practices of the film industry is the construction of a narrative image for each individual film: An idea of the film is widely circulated and promoted, an idea which can be called the narrative image of the film, the cinema s anticipatory reply to the question, What is the film like? Ellis, 1981, p.30
76 Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity The discourse of film industry publicity and marketing play a key role in the construction of such narrative images; but important, too, are other institutionalised public discourses, especially those of the press and television, and the unofficial, word of mouth discourses of everyday life. Genre is, of course, an important ingredient in any film s narrative image. The indication of relevant generic characteristics is therefore one of the most important functions that advertisements, stills, reviews and posters perform. Reviews nearly always contain terms indicative of a film s generic status, while posters usually offer verbal generic (and hyperbolic) description The Greatest War Picture Ever Made as anchorage for the generic iconography in pictorial form. These various verbal and pictorial descriptions form what Gregory Lukow and Steven Ricci have called the cinema s intertextual relay (Lukow and Ricci, 1984). This relay performs an additional, generic function: not only does it define and circulate narrative images for individual films, beginning the immediate narrative process of expectation and anticipation, it also helps to define and circulate, in combination with the films themselves, what one might call generic images, providing sets of labels, terms and expectations which will come to characterise the genre as a whole. [...] Genre as process It may at first sight seem as though repetition and sameness are the primary hallmarks of genres: as though, therefore, genres are above all inherently static. But as Hans Robert Jauss and Ralph Cohen (and I myself) have argued (Cohen 1986, pp.205 6; Jauss, 1982, p.80; Neale, 1980, p.19), genres are, nevertheless best understood as processes. These processes may, for sure, be dominated by repetition, but they are also marked fundamentally by difference, variation and change. The process-like nature of genres manifests itself as an interaction between three levels: the level of expectation, the level of the generic corpus, and the level of the rules or norms that govern both. Each new genre film constitutes an addition to an existing generic corpus and involves a selection from the repertoire of generic elements available at any one point in time. Some elements are included; others are excluded. Indeed some are mutually exclusive: at most points in its history, the horror film has had to characterise its monster either supernaturally as in Dracula (1930) or psychologically as in Psycho (1960). In addition, each new genre film tends to extend this repertoire, either by adding a new element or by transgressing one of
the old ones. Thus, for instance, Halloween (1979) transgressed the division between psychological and supernatural monsters, giving its monster the attributes of both. In this way the elements and conventions of a genre are always in play rather than being, simply re-played; 2 and any generic corpus is always being expanded. Memories of the films within a corpus constitute one of the bases of generic expectation. So, too, does the stock of generic images produced by advertisements, posters and the like. As both corpus and image expand and change with the appearance of new films, new advertising campaigns, new reviews, so also what Jauss has termed the horizon of expectation appropriate to each genre expands and changes as well:... the relationship between the individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself as a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons. The new text evokes for the reader (or listener) the horizon of expectations and rules of the game familiar to him from earlier texts, which as such can then be varied, extended, corrected, but also transformed, crossed out, or simply reproduced. Jauss, 1982, p.79 This is one reason why it is so difficult to list exhaustively the characteristic components of individual genres, or to define them in anything other than the most banal or tautological terms: a Western is a film set on the American Western frontier; a war film is a film that represents the waging of war; a detective film is a film about the investigation of criminals and crime, and so on. [...] Exclusive definitions, lists of exclusive characteristics, are particularly hard to produce. At what point do Westerns become musicals like Oklahoma! (1955) or Paint Your Wagon (1969) or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)? At what point do singing Westerns become musicals? A what point do comedies with songs (like A Night at the Opera (1935)) become musical comedies? And so on. These examples all, of course, do more than indicate the processlike nature of individual genres. They also indicate the extent to which individual genres not only form part of a generic regime, but also themselves change, develop and vary by borrowing from, and overlapping with, one another. Hybrids are by no means the rarity in Hollywood many books and articles on genre in the cinema would have us believe. This is one reason why, as Mark Vernet has pointed out, a guide to film screenings will often offer to the spectator rubrics like: Western, detective film, horror film, and comedy; but also: dramatic comedy, psychological drama, or even erotic detective film [...] (Vernet, 1978). Chapter 2 The celebrity in the text 77
78 Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity [...] It is indeed, therefore, the case that mass-produced, popular genres have to be understood within an economic context, as conditioned by specific economic imperatives and by specific economic contradictions in particular, of course, those that operate within specific institutions and industries. That is why it is important to stress the financial advantages to the film industry of an aesthetic regime based on regulated difference, contained variety, pre-sold expectations, and the re-use of resources in labour and materials. It is also why it is important to stress the peculiar nature of films as aesthetic commodities, commodities demanding at least a degree of novelty and difference from one to another and why it is necessary to explore the analogies and the distinctions between cycles and genres in the cinema, on the one hand, and models and lines in the field of non-artistic commodity production, on the other. Notes 1 For discussions of verisimilitude and genre see Ben Brewster, Film, in Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Michael Irwin (eds) (1987) Exploring Reality, London, Allen & Unwin (esp. pp.147 9); Gerard Genette (1969) Vraisemblance et motivation, Figures, vol.3; and Tzvetan Todorov (1977) The typology of detective fiction and An introduction to verisimilitude in The Poetics of Prose, Ithaca, Cornell University Press; and Tzvetan Todorov (1981) Introduction to Poetics, Brighton, The Harvester Press (esp. pp.118 19). 2 I owe this phrase to an unpublished lecture on genre by Elizabeth Cowie.